Thursday, January 8, 2015

Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

In the family of life, humankind’s two closest living
relatives are bonobos and chimpanzees, two apes with strikingly different
approaches to living.Ninety-eight
percent of our DNA is the same as theirs.These three intelligent cousins share a common ancestor that lived five to
seven million years ago.In his book, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape,
primatologist Frans de Waal does a superb job of comparing the three cousins,
and the photos of Frans Lanting are fantastic.

In Africa, chimps far outnumber bonobos, and inhabit a larger
territory.The two never meet in the
wild, because apes cannot swim, and the Zaire River keeps them apart.Both reside in dense tropical rainforests,
and both sleep in the trees.They are
similar in appearance, and it wasn’t until 1929 that scientists realized that
bonobos and chimps were different species.

Bonobos are lucky to live in a dense and rugged rainforest that
is difficult for humans to get to, explore, and destroy.Researchers can spend many days thrashing
around in the foliage, completely unaware that a group of bonobos is silently looking
down at them from the thick canopy above.Bonobos were not studied in the wild until the mid-1970s, and research
was interrupted from 1994 to 2003, by a civil war that claimed three million
lives.Chimps, on the other hand, had
been known and studied for a long time.

During the twentieth century, industrial warfare brutally
exterminated millions of humans.For
some reason, it became trendy to perceive humans as inherently violent.Chimps were seen in a similar light, because
of their resemblance to industrial humans.Once, when two chimp groups came into contact, researchers observed the
brutal massacre of the weaker group.

De Waal offered this insight on male chimps:“Their cooperative, action-packed existence
resembles that of the human males who, in modern society, team up with other
males in corporations within which they compete while collectively fighting
other corporations.”

Chimps and civilized humans typically live in groups
dominated by alpha males who actively subdue their rivals.Females are second-class.When an alpha male chimp reaches retirement
age, and is clobbered by a vigorous young upstart, the new alpha often kills
the old fellow’s young offspring, so their mothers can promptly begin producing
offspring with his genes.Because of
this, females with young tend to go off and forage alone, avoiding contact with
the bloody stud and his buddies.

Bonobos look a lot like chimps, but live very differently.Bonobo groups are matriarchal, and males are
second-class.Females determine how food
is shared, and they eat while the males wait.Chimps have sex only when a female is fertile.Bonobos have sex almost anytime, several
times a day, with anyone interested, young or old, in every imaginable way.

The genitals of female bonobos become enormously swollen when
they are receptive to sexual delights.They are receptive almost half of the time, whilst being fertile for
just a few days.Non-reproductive sex is
an excellent way to defuse conflicts, keep everyone relaxed, and have a
pleasant day.Because everyone has sex
with everyone, paternity is impossible to determine.Therefore, male bonobos do not kill infants,
because any infant might be their offspring.

Hominids have taken a third path, the nuclear family.Long ago, with the arrival of the chilly
glacial era, the rainforests we evolved in came close to disappearing.Our ancestors shifted outside the
forest.The nuclear family was an
adaptation for surviving on the open savannah.Hominid offspring benefitted when their mothers and fathers lived
together and cooperated.Tightly knit groups
of aggressive hominids could successfully kill game and fend off predators.The strongest, fiercest males were more
likely to survive and reproduce, so natural selection favored these traits.

Promiscuity was discouraged, because males did not want to spend
their lives raising a rival’s offspring.Thus, the nuclear family reduced the reproductive freedom of females,
via moral constraints.Hominid societies
have probably been male-dominated from the start.Male control further increased with the shift
to sedentary living, and the accumulation of property.Males wanted their life savings to be
inherited by their own offspring.This
led to an obsession with virginity and chastity, and the prickly patriarchal
mindset.

Civilized societies have developed patriarchal cultures.“With a few notable exceptions, such as
spotted hyenas and the lemurs of Madagascar, male dominance is the standard
mammalian pattern.”Chimps follow this
pattern but, to the great delight of feminists, the discovery of female-dominant
bonobo society has presented a less macho alternative.So, who are humans?De Waal says that humans are in the middle,
between the two poles — both aggressive and empathetic.

Why are chimps and bonobos so different?Both have low birth rates, and nurse their
young for four or five years.Bonobos
live in a habitat with abundant food, and no serious competitors in their
ecological niche, an ideal situation.Chimps live in leaner lands, and compete for food with gorillas and
baboons.They feel the squeeze of
crowding, and they reduce this pressure by infanticide, and by killing competitors.Infanticide is common in many species, including
lions, prairie dogs, mice, chimps, and gorillas.

We live in an era of extinctions, and the numbers of chimps
and bonobos are in sharp decline, as their human cousins relentlessly
expand.Diamond miners, loggers, bush
meat hunters, and war refugees continue pushing into their habitat.

De Waal appeared in a fascinating documentary, The Last Great Ape.It includes many scenes of bonobos living in
the wild.We see them enjoying a
pleasant life — eating fruit, having sex, climbing trees, playing, having sex,
grooming each other, nursing.In one
scene, viewers look down from a plane zooming over the jungle, and the narrator
says, “This part of the forest is like a time capsule; bonobos may have existed
here in much the same way for two million years.”Wow!

Viewers see animals that look like our ancestors, live like
our ancestors, and still inhabit the region where our species originated.The bonobos have obviously remained far more
stable over two million years than humans have, because they enjoy good luck
and just enough intelligence to live well in their niche.When I contemplate the era of my 62-year
life, and the skyrocketing destruction caused by humankind, it breaks my heart
— and mindlessly killing the planet doesn’t even make us happy.Big brains do not guarantee long-term
stability and ecological sustainability.

Patriarchal chimps have also succeeded in living for two
million years, in the same region, in a stable manner.While they rudely offend our humanist and
feminist sensibilities, they have evolved a way of living that is thousand
times less destructive than that of the humanists and feminists in our insane
society.

This raises an embarrassing question.Exactly how did we benefit from complex
language, literacy, technology, domestication, agriculture, civilization, and
industrialization?

The
Last Great Ape, WGBH, 2007 (the BBC version is titled Bonobo: Missing in Action,
2006).The transcript is here.Copyright holders periodically block YouTube
access to this program, so it keeps changing names.Search for “bonobo” videos that are 51
minutes long.

The Baka Pygmies
are our relatives who have lived in the African rainforest close to forever.In this video (2 min), they
make an incredibly joyful noise.The
aura they radiate is that of wild people with deep roots in their ancestral
home.Sadly, their teeth indicate that
their diet has been civilized.

This video (5 min)
includes beautiful portraits of Baka Pygmies, along with their music.The faces of the children radiate a glowing sense
of joy and contentment.